I’m a high intermediate to low advanced reader in Spanish looking to reach full reading fluency, and I’ve been reading a combination of books at the B1-B2 levels and newspaper articles at the C1-C2 levels (at least according to Readlang). When I encounter a word or phrase I don’t know how to translate into English in that context, I save it as a flashcard. I’ve been consistently saving 2-3% of the words in any given text, which seems very low but results in hundreds and hundreds of flashcards piling up much faster than I can go through them if I’m keeping the number of new cards per day reasonable. Does 2-3% sound crazy to you guys? I’ve only been doing this for a couple weeks so one assumes the numbers will gradually go down, but it’s not like I’m new to Spanish.
I’m a non-native English speaker at the level that you typically call “native-like” (I’ve taken my high school diploma in English). I normally encounter about 2-5 unknown words per printed page of English text, so that would be something like 1-2%. So I think that highlighting 2-3% of items is not far from the typical long-term ratio. This is not a real problem for Read lang: you are not expected to practice all words you have ever highlighted! ReadLang makes sure that the most frequent words (based on a one-size-fits-all corpus) are added to your practice first.
In linguistics, Zipf’s law states that a very large number of word forms you’ll encounter in texts are words you’ll only ever see once. When you first encounter a new word, there is no way to know whether you’ll need to learn this particular word, so just highlight it and hope that the ReadLang ordering algorithm will do a good job in selecting useful words for practice.
Great answer @Anna_Vernerova. Thanks!